Episode Topic: Hitchcock, "Rear Window" (film)
Although Alfred Hitchcock’s "Rear Window" (1954) does not take place in the context of a plague, it is a film about being in lockdown. Its preoccupations may be subtly shaped by the context of the early 1950s which saw Americans return to ordinary domestic life after the upheavals and mobilizations of the war. The premise of the film is simple - a leg injury confines a photographer to his Manhattan apartment and he breaks the monotony by obsessively observing his neighbors. However, the film works on several levels: literal, psychological, symbolic. It explores what happens to our minds when we are cut off from the world outside the home, when the only travel we can undertake is internal, and when our own thoughts end up projecting themselves onto our surroundings.
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Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: go.nd.edu/10ce19.
This podcast is a part of the London Book Club Series titled “Literature & Film in Lockdown".
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